Sign (semiotics)

About: Sign (semiotics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4080 publications have been published within this topic receiving 70333 citations. The topic is also known as: semiotic sign.

Semiotics and Pragmatics

Abstract: Looking at the ‘semiotic landscape’ – the panorama of constituted semiotics – two traditions seem to have developed separately and without interpenetration. Anglo-Saxon semioticians consider the Peircean framework to provide the adequate conceptual apparatus, whereas so-called ‘Continental’ semioticians refer to the sign theory in Saussure and in its interpretation by Hjelmslev (for instance, the Ecole semiotique de Paris ). Evaluating each other’s projects, methods, and results could lead to a balanced view. The purpose of this monograph is to get the best out of the adequate insights from both sides, and to make suggestions how the semioticians from the Peircean or Saussuro-Hjelmslevian school can be removed from their isolationist positions. A comparison and homologation of these two orientations will be carried out from the angle of the impact of pragmaticism on both semiotic orientations. How intentionality, action, conventionality, interlocution are integrated in both orientations will be given particular emphasis.

The body and the fading away of abstract concepts and words: a sign language analysis

Abstract: One of the most important challenges for embodied and grounded theories of cognition concerns the representation of abstract concepts, such as "freedom". Many embodied theories of abstract concepts have been proposed. Some proposals stress the similarities between concrete and abstract concepts showing that they are both grounded in perception and action system while other emphasize their difference favouring a multiple representation view. An influential view proposes that abstract concepts are mapped to concrete ones through metaphors. Furthermore, some theories underline the fact that abstract concepts are grounded in specific contents, as situations, introspective states, emotions. These approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive, since it is possible that they can account for different subsets of abstract concepts and words. One novel and fruitful way to understand the way in which abstract concepts are represented is to analyze how sign languages encode concepts into signs. In the present paper we will discuss these theoretical issues mostly relying on examples taken from Italian Sign Language (LIS, Lingua dei Segni Italiana), the visual-gestural language used within the Italian Deaf community. We will verify whether and to what extent LIS signs provide evidence favoring the different theories of abstract concepts. In analyzing signs we will distinguish between direct forms of involvement of the body and forms in which concepts are grounded differently, for example relying on linguistic experience. In dealing with the LIS evidence, we will consider the possibility that different abstract concepts are represented using different levels of embodiment. The collected evidence will help us to discuss whether a unitary embodied theory of abstract concepts is possible or whether the different theoretical proposals can account for different aspects of their representation.

Messages and meanings

Abstract: Ideology is the final connotation of the totality of connotations of the sign or the context of signs. (Umberto Eco, 1971, p. 83)Interest in and discussion of the mass media has come from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary sources. Within these wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory approaches, the analysis of media messages has been seen as of varying importance. American concern with mass communications has tended to focus on a model of communication which stressed the relationships between the individuals involved. In this tradition the communication process was conceived of as a relationship between a sender of messages on the one hand and a receiver of messages on the other. The mass communication process merely converted the receiver from being one to being many individuals. Given this image of the workings of the mass media, the attention of researchers was directed at the psychological dispositions of the producers of mass media messages and at the effects of the message on the members of the audience. The analysis of the meaning of media messages came to be subsumed in these areas of study. Moreover, early Marxist studies of the media, whilst based on very different theoretical premises, tended to be more concerned with the overall ideological role of the mass media in capitalist societies and less concerned with the meaning of and the production of meaning within specific media messages. When such questions were addressed they were inflected with a form of cultural pessimism. Members of the Frankfurt School, for example, attempted to show that mass culture, and particularly, American mass culture with which they had acquired a forced familiarity, was a debased culture. Adorno and Horkheimer (1977) suggested that the culture of a society under monopoly capitalism was peculiarly repressive in that while bourgeois culture offered a better and more valuable world realizable by every individual from within, mass culture produced a more totalitarian state in which even the illusory advantage of inner freedom of the individual was lost.

Caged in Our Own Signs: A Book about Semiotics

Abstract: Acknowledgments WHAT IS SEMIOTICS? THE STRUCTURE OF SIGNS. Sign = Signifier + Signified Signification A Dialectic Synthesis The Sign, The Lie, The Truth SIGNS AND MEANINGS Icon, Index, Symbol Monosemy-Polysemy. Denotation: Connotation Scheme: Usage. Similarities: Differences Categories of Signs REALITY CONSTRUCTION Categories Metaphors Metonymies Images CODES AND CODIFICATION Arbitrariness and Convention Convention and Motivation Codification and De-codification Paradigm and Syntagm Definition of Codes Three Types of Codes Restructuring Codes Codes for Prescribed Society SEMIOSIS Human Semiosis Tripartite Models of Semiosis Two Branches of Semiosis Characterisitic of Nesting Semiotization Crisis in Representation Centrality of Text SEMIOLOGICAL SPACE Human = Semiological Space Language: Psychological Space The Semiotic Self. Heaven: The Dialectic Space Internal Image External Image TEXT SEMIOTICS Barthes' Model The Sand Myth Defining the Text The Structure of the Text Binary Oppositions Synchronicity, Dichronicity, Panchronicity Paradigm and Synchronicity Syntagm and Diachronicity Metalanguage MYTHOLOGY Myth as Form Myth as Discourse Diachronic Text Analysis The Characteristics of Myth IDEOLOGY From Mythology to Ideology Myth and Hegemony Definitive Meanings Counter-Myth MASS CULTURAL SEMIOTICS Television Film Photography Cartoons Conclusion: Two Realities MYTH- MAKING The Womb of Stories The Semiotic Square A Three-Layer Structure A Story of Man Four Types of Labor The Loci of a Serial Death Calling for Narratives of Life References Glossary Index

Limiting the Iconic: From the metatheoretical foundations to the creative possibilities of iconicity in language

Abstract: Iconicity has become a popular notion in contemporary linguistic research. This book is the first to present a synthesis of the vast amount of scholarship on linguistic iconicity which has been produced in the previous decades, ranging from iconicity in phonology and morpho-syntax to the role of iconicity in language change. An extensive analysis is provided of some basic but nonetheless fundamental questions relating to iconicity in language, including: what is a linguistic sign and how are linguistic signs different from signs in general? What is an iconic sign and how may iconicity be involved in language? How does iconicity pertain to the relation between language and cognition? This book offers a new and comprehensive theoretical framework for iconicity in language. It is argued that the linguistic sign is fundamentally arbitrary, but that iconicity may be involved on a secondary level, adding extra meaning to an utterance.